Gabriel Rosenstock & Debiprasad Mukherjee: Mural World

Debiprasad Mukherjee, Mural World - The Culturium — Debiprasad Mukherjee, *Mural World*.
Photograph: © Debiprasad Mukherjee

Metonymic moments

looking / not looking
hearing / not hearing—
look now

féachaint / gan féachaint
éisteacht / gan éisteacht—
féach anois

Gabriel Rosenstock is the author/translator of over 150 books, including 13 volumes of poetry and a volume of haiku, mostly in Gaelic. Prose work includes fiction, essays in The Irish Times, radio plays and travel writing. He has given readings and performances in Europe, USA, India, Japan and Australia and is a member of Aosdána (Irish Academy of Arts & Letters). Broken Angels is the fourth in an ongoing series of ekphrastic tanka books published by Cross-Cultural Communications, New York, and available as a free e-book on the EDOCR platform.

Debiprasad Mukherjee is an independent documentary photographer based in Kolkata, India. He graduated in Electrical Engineering and completed his postgraduate in Business Management. His strong passion for documentary photography and photojournalism has led him to travel to various countries like Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, UAE, Iraq, Bangladesh, USA and the UK.

In this week’s guest post for The Culturium, Gabriel and Debiprasad collaborate once again to create a beautiful fusion of visual art and versification, whereby the inner lives of people from diverse creeds and cultures are reflected within the painted stories on the murals of our towns and cities across the globe.

Life is always like a painting—you draw, you erase … Historically, people used painting as an abstract expression of moments lived. Paintings on walls across the globe continue to be the portraiture of people’s social structures, the mirrors which reflect their own stories, the impression of their own inner feelings.

Snapshots of various emotions—love and hate, failures and successes, ups and downs, dreams and nightmares—all culminate to evolve into a beautiful story, maybe knowingly, maybe unknowingly. Yet the painter remains anonymous, the faces remain unknown. Different pictures emanate different tunes, which mingle into a single music called life.

Life is nothing but a bouquet of moments and these murals around the world are nothing but snapshots of some of these precious times. People do not paint a wall; they paint their lives. They write their personal diaries on the wall, which they cannot say in words, to the entire world.
—Debiprasad Mukherjee